Fight Path: The Karate Kid and Dan Hardy were on Jim Wallhead's road to Bellator

It’s tough when you’re not talking face-to-face, and we certainly were not. We were on a conference call between my house in Ohio and Wallhead’s home in Loughborough, England.

Did he just say Karate Kid?

“I saw it on the tele,” Wallhead told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Yeah, the Karate Kid, with Daniel Larusso and Mr. Miyagi and all of it.”

It was, indeed, the 1984 movie that inspired Wallhead to take up karate. After making his demands, the then-7-year-old Wallhead convinced his mother to help him find a place to train in this magical martial arts form.

Mrs. Wallhead, though, accidentally took her son to a judo place, and so began the career that would lead Wallhead to the nickname “Judo Jim” and gain him a spot in the upcoming eight-man welterweight tournament in the anticipated second season of Bellator Fighting Championships.

There’s more to Wallhead’s story than just a desire to be Ralph Macchio, of course. He became an international judo competitor who spent nine years dedicated to the art before he fell in with a crowd that took him, as he put it, “off the rails.”

Wallhead took his first fight with about five minutes’ notice and no MMA training. He met his future training partners in a bathroom after he suffered his second loss as a passionate, swinging and undisciplined mess.

After it all, the 25-year-old Wallhead has compiled an 18-5 record that has made him one of the most notable British fighters as he enters a possibly career-changing opportunity.

“I’m smiling now just thinking about it,” Wallhead said of the Bellator spot. “I just have to take it with both hands and go for it.”

The Judo Kid, instead

One imagines Wallhead staring at his television while captivated by the Larusso’s story. But, after he ended up in the judo school, he wasn’t sure if he should stay. There was just too little contact.

“Then my dad says, ‘I used to work with that guy,’ and pointed at one of the guys there,” Wallhead said. “His name was Rocky, and he had a tough look, a military hairstyle. He looked like the Cobra Kai coach.”

So, Wallhead stayed, and Rocky became his first instructor. As the son of parents who had been married “with 17 pounds between them” (for you American readers, that’s about $27) but built a comfortable life for their family, Wallhead had a family athletic background that included a county table tennis champion father and a county long jump champion mother.

In judo, he excelled. In two months, he won two local tournaments as peers recognized his bright future.

“Up until I was 14 or 15, I was always at competitions,” he said. “I trained in France on an exchange program, and when I was 15, I qualified for the European Youth Olympics.”

The competition, held in a large stadium, was a significant accomplishment for Wallhead, who placed seventh. But, he jokes that he continues to protest whether his first-round opponent was the same age.

“He was a Russian with a gold tooth and more hair on his chest than I have now,” he said.

Continuing judo until he was 17, Wallhead then got off track. He starting hanging out, he said, with a wrong crowd and got away from the training he had known. He no longer had the discipline and regularity of training.

But, before long, he found a new kind of training, though he didn’t plan on it.

An important bathroom meeting

Wallhead was casually attending an event involving several fights about four years ago when an old judo friend approached him.

“He had another guy with him,” Wallhead said. “He says to him, ‘This guy used to be really good at judo.’ The other guy says, ‘Do you want to fight? We have a show going on tonight.'”

Wallhead basically shrugged his shoulders and climbed on in. That was his first fight, several years out of judo training and without any MMA-specific knowledge. His plan, basically, was just to go nuts.

“I was just swinging like a guy on the street,” he said.

Enjoying the action in the cage, Wallhead continued to take fights. After his first four, he was 2-2, but he had never sparred, never really trained and was mostly going on instinct.

In the bathroom after his second loss, wondering what direction this fighting could possibly take him, Wallhead bumped into another fighter named Dan Hardy, a popular British fighter who is now the next to challenge for Georges St-Pierre’s welterweight title.

“He said, ‘You’re a nutcase, but you have a lot of aggression; you just don’t know how to fight,'” Wallhead said.

Wallhead accepted an invitation to train at Hardy’s gym, and his career advanced. In his past 19 fights, he is 16-3 with a six-fight winning streak. He has gained enough notoriety that he was followed for a week in July 2008 by a camera crew from a prominent English television station for a documentary.

The show, not yet broadcast, was meant to focus on men with unique jobs or circumstances and how that affected their home lives. Wallhead was the example of a testosterone-driven fighter, and the crew followed him training.

He responded with possibly his best fight, a unanimous decision victory against Fabricio Nascimento at a Cage Warriors Fighting Championships event. Most recently, Wallhead topped Che Mills at a Knuckle Up MMA show in Wales to continue his significant experience.

Now, Wallhead will enter a Bellator tournament with growing buzz because of its deep field, which includes the likes of Dan Hornbuckle (19-2), Jacob McClintock (6-0), Ben Askren (3-0) and Steve Carl (10-1). Wallhead hopes to make a more permanent impression on fans throughout the world.

“There are some wicked fighters in this tournament,” he said. “It should be a great experience.”

Award-winning newspaper reporter Kyle Nagel is the lead features writer for MMAjunkie.com. His weekly “Fight Path” column focuses on the circumstances that led fighters to a profession in MMA. Know a fighter with an interesting story? Email us at news [at] mmajunkie.com.

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